Multipath cancellation by frequency diversity: a training-free and analytical approach to accurate rss ranging in ground-deployed wireless sensor networks

Received signal strength (RSS) ranging in multipath environments suffers from two major drawbacks: laborious training and poor accuracy. Based on the observation that frequency-squared weighted RSS is periodic with respect to carrier frequency, multipath cancellation by frequency diversity (MCFD) is proposed, which is a novel training-free approach to RSS ranging that makes RSS measurements at multiple frequencies and combines them together to cancel out the multipath effect. Simulations and experimental results in two common scenarios for ground-deployed wireless sensor networks show that MCFD outperforms traditional RSS ranging in accuracy.